I had a three months long internship at Gradle this summer. I will write about my experience at the company and reflect on what I’ve learned.
You might have heard of Gradle if you are an Android developer. It’s a default built-in build tool for Android Studio. More broadly, the company creates a build tool for large code bases used in big tech companies (like LinkedIn). But in this post, instead of going in depth with the technical aspect of what I learned, I will focus more on the general experience that would be beneficial to the wider audience. Here we go:
Referral is the key to getting jobs.
I started looking for tech internships in March. If you a little bit about tech internships in the US, you know that’s too late. Usually, big companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft open their internship application in September and fill up most internship positions by November the latest. When I applied to those companies, I either didn’t hear back or got an email saying “Hey, I’m sorry but the spots are all filled.” I also applied to mid-sized companies like Slack, Airbnb and Uber but the situation was similar. But one company luckily offered me an interview. I talked with a recruiter, and few days later, he sent me an email saying I’m not a good fit for the position. It was mid-April. I almost made up my mind to return to Japan and look for jobs there. That was when I received a follow up email from that recruiter saying that he forwarded my resume to several other companies they’ve shared an office few years ago. And by the end of that day, I got 5 interviews. And one of them was Gradle. They were looking for someone who can deal with data. I’ve told them that I’ve been studying statistics in college, and they’ve offered me a job. I felt the power of reference. Had that interviewer did not forward my resume to his friends, I wouldn’t have got an internship.
The Benefits of startups
1. The scope of your work is huge.
I can’t say much in details, but I was in charge of a great portion of the data engineering at the company. Tbh, I knew little about databases and especially cloud computing services like AWS and Google Cloud Platform. But by I searched the web, read books and asked mentors as I worked. By the end of my internship, I became pretty knowledgable about SQL databases and cloud computing. There were some hard times that I just wanted to throw away things, but being this a job forced me to push myself. Something you can’t gain from self studying is this feeling of “No matter how hard it is, you’ve gotta do it cause it’s in the contract.”
2. You can make an impact to the company.
Often times I hear from my friends who interned at large tech companies that the works they’ve done were something similar to improving the UI of a single page for three months. I’m sure it’s not that terrible, but one perks of working at a startup is that you can feel that you’re pushing the company forward. In my case, the sales and marketing teams were waiting for my data. And when I gave them what they needed, they thanked me. It encourages you to be thanked for the work you put in. Even if the work contains mundane routines, you still feel like you’ve accomplished something for the company.
About Remote Working
Pros
Gradle started out as an open source. So most employees work remotely. There are about 30 employees, and only 5–6 of them show up in the San Francisco HQ. The rest live in Germany, Australia, and other cities in the US. So, although I lived in SF, I never felt obliged to come to the office early and stay till late. I usually commuted 3,4 times a week, coming in at 11 and leaving at 5. The rest of the time, I worked from home. But no one accused me for doing so. As long as I got the work done, I could work from anywhere at anytime.
Cons
One is that I became idle sometimes. I started to get used to working home in the end, but I sometimes felt lazy and woke up late, and spent more time procrastinating than I would’ve had I went to the office to work. The other one is that it took me some time to get to know the people, especially the engineers since they were all working remotely. The Gradle engineers are all contributors of the Gradle open source project, and expert developers. If I worked with them in the same office, I could’ve learned more from them.
The lack of a technical mentor was a bit painful.
This was probably the biggest shortcoming of the internship. Although I had autonomy and control over an impactful job, I didn’t have someone who was more knowledgeable about what I was about to go through. At big companies, you are asked to assist a team project or take on a smaller portion of a big project. In either cases, you have a leading position in the team who knows more about the job you do. But at a startup where you are considered kind of as a full time position, you are the one who provide the value to the company. I could ask other engineers for help, but it often took few hours to get their replies since they all worked remotely. I ended up asking engineers working at other companies for advice. It was great in that I built up the persistence and the ability to learn everything on my own. But sometimes, I missed a “Yoda” like person who provided me the bigger picture of my work.
San Francisco is the best place to be if you’re in tech.
So many meetups, so many great people. The weather is nice. I’ve never thought about attending Make School after this internship if I didn’t come to San Francisco over the summer. If you’re studying CS/software engineering in college, SF is the must-live city.
In short, SF is nice. Yet to find out whether I like smaller companies over big companies. I’ll probably come back to the SF soon probably with an internship at a midsize-big company.
